Sunday, August 22, 2010

Why the government of Philadelphia is made of fail

Not only would the mayor & Co. like to trash the 2nd, they do crap like this:For the past three years, Marilyn Bess has operated MS Philly Organic, a small, low-traffic blog that features occasional posts about green living, out of her Manayunk home. Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.

In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license....So even if your blog collects a handful of hits a day, as long as there's the potential for it to be lucrative — and, as Mandale points out, most hosting sites set aside space for bloggers to sell advertising — the city thinks you should cut it a check. According to Andrea Mannino of the Philadelphia Department of Revenue, in fact, simply choosing the option to make money from ads — regardless of how much or little money is actually generated — qualifies a blog as a business. Isn't that just freakin' wonderful? Let's ignore any actual amount of money earned and take a long, hard look at that line again: as long as there's the potential for it to be lucrative they think they should be able to tax you. They've got this set up so even if you don't have ads they can claim there's the 'potential' for profit and that's their excuse for demanding you get a license.

Which leads me to wondering when they'll start trying to use this to shut down blogs that say things they don't like("Hey, we're all for free speech, but this blog didn't buy the business license, so we HAD to shut it down.")?

And this counts as 'helping solve the problem':In June, City Council members Bill Green and Maria Quiñones-Sánchez unveiled a proposal to reform the city's business privilege tax in an effort to make Philly a more attractive place for small businesses. If their bill passes, bloggers will still have to get a privilege license if their sites are designed to make money(And remember that bit above about ad space and 'potential'), but they would no longer have to pay taxes on their first $100,000 in profit. (If bloggers don't want to fork over $300 for a lifetime license, Green suggests they take the city's $50-a-year plan.)

Their bill will be officially introduced in September. "There's a lot of support and interest in this idea," Green says.There ought to be a lot of support and interest in borrowing a roofing tar trailer and buying a bunch of pillows and visiting City Hall.

1 comment:

Of course, the up side is, if it's a business, you can claim the costs of running it as a business expense on your taxes.

Sure, you have to pay for the business license, but that is a business expense, as well as the web site hosting, your computer, office space, and anything else you can think of that's related to posting content.

So, there's a couple of thousand dollars a year you can claim on taxes as business expenses, minus the ten or twenty bucks you might garner from ad revenue.

Someone better at tax law would have to do the heavy work, but it could work out to be a net positive.

I wonder how long it would be before the state started figuring out that, at the gain to the city of a $300 business license, they are losing out on several hundred dollars (or more) of income taxes every year?

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Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences. - C.S. Lewis

Y'all got on this boat for different reasons, but y'all come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave. - Capt. Mal

A Rifleman’s Prayer:Oh Lord, I would live my life in freedom, peace and happiness, enjoying the simple pleasures of hearth and home. I would die an old, old man in my own bed, preferably of sexual overexertion.

But if that is not to be, Lord, if monsters such as this should find their way to my little corner of the world on my watch, then help me to sweep those bastards from the ramparts, because doing that is good, and right, and just.

And if in this I should fall, let me be found atop a pile of brass, behind the wall I made of their corpses. Geek with a .45

"He's Black Council,", I said.

"Or maybe stupid," Ebenezar countered.

I thought about it. "Not sure which is scarier."

Ebenezar blinked at me, then snorted. "Stupid, Hoss. Every time. Only so many blackhearted villains in the world, and they only get uppity on occasion. Stupid's everywhere, every day." Ebenezar McCoy

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This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself." Dr. M.L. King Jr.